Excellent! This is a great article with much food for thought. Like during the 60s where MLK lost and Malcolm X won, the Islamic rationalists lost the debate and the current orthodoxy became entrenched. I think there is hope for black America, but I'm not willing to speculate easily on the future of Islamic thought.

I've started looking deeper into this aspect of Islamic theology by means of comparative religion. Nabeel Qureshi has written a fantastic book comparing Christian and Islamic theology, with fascinating insights into the history of Islam and the forces that shape(d) its thinking. The early chapter on the Islamic Inquisition is an eye opener for me. The book is No God But One - Allah or Jesus?

Something that has influenced my thinking greatly is "evolutionary psychology" in general and the writings of Konrad Lorenz in particular (after whom my son Conrad is named btw).

One of his most important books is "On Aggression". Speaking quite simplistically about a subtle book, Lorenz says aggression (defined as intra and not inter species) has three purposes: Territory; Hierarchy; and Reproduction.

In my own thinking in the case of humans I have added Predation. Normally predatory behavior is inter species and thus outside the definition of aggression, but in the case of humans, much criminal behavior is predatory in nature (e.g. the money stolen is a form of food)

But I digress , , ,

In one of his final books, "The Waning of Humanness" Lorenz spoke of particular dynamic that he called "collective militant enthusiasm" in which a group whips itself into a frenzy for collective action against "the other".

Lenin-Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Islamic Fascism can all be seen as manifestations of this dynamic.

Some time ago, the invaluable Patrick Poole coined the term “known wolf,” sharply shredding the conventional Washington wisdom that “lone wolf” terrorism is a major domestic threat.

Pat has tracked the phenomenon for years, right up to the jihadist attacks this weekend in both the New York metropolitan area and St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Virtually every time a terror attack has occurred, the actor initially portrayed as a solo plotter lurking under the government’s radar turns out to be -- after not much digging – an already known (sometimes even, notorious) Islamic extremist.

As amply demonstrated by Poole’s reporting, catalogued here by PJ Media, "lone wolves" --virtually every single one -- end up having actually had extensive connections to other Islamic extremists, radical mosques, and (on not rare occasions) jihadist training facilities.Sponsored

The overarching point I have been trying to make is fortified by Pat’s factual reporting. It is this: There are, and can be, no lone wolves.

The very concept is inane, and only stems from a willfully blind aversion to the ideological foundation of jihadist terror: Islamic supremacism.

The global, scripturally rooted movement to impose sharia -- in the West, to incrementally supersede our culture of reason, liberty, and equality with the repressive, discriminatory norms of classical Islamic law -- is a pack. The wolves are members of the pack, and that’s why they are the antithesis of “lone” actors. And, indeed, they always turn out to be “known” precisely because their association with the pack, with components of the global movement, is what ought to have alerted us to the danger they portended before they struck.

This is willful blindness, because of the restrictions we have gratuitously imposed on ourselves.

The U.S. government refuses to acknowledge the ideology that drives the movement until after some violent action is either too imminent to be ignored or, sadly more often, until after the Islamic supremacist has acted out the savagery his ideology commands.

The U.S. government consciously avoids the ideology because it is rooted in a fundamentalist, literalist interpretation of Islam. Though it is but one of many ways to construe that religion, the remorseless fact is that it is a mainstream construction, adhered to by tens of millions of Muslims and supported by centuries of scholarship.

I say “the U.S. government” is at fault here because, contrary to Republican campaign rhetoric that is apparently seized by amnesia, this is not merely an Obama administration dereliction -- however much the president and his former secretary of State (and would-be successor) Hillary Clinton have exacerbated the problem.

Since the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, the bipartisan Beltway cognoscenti have “reasoned” (a euphemism for “reckless self-delusion”) that conceding the Islamic doctrinal roots of jihadist terror -- which would implicitly concede the vast Islamist (sharia-supremacist) support system without which the global jihadist onslaught would be impossible -- is impractical.Sponsored

But how could acknowledging the truth be impractical?

Especially given that national security hinges on an accurate assessment of threats?

Obama Press Sec.: 'This is Actually Just a War of Narratives' Against ISIS

Bipartisan Washington “reasons” that telling the truth would portray the United States as “at war with Islam.” To be blunt, this conventional wisdom can only be described as sheer idiocy.

We know that tens of millions of Muslims worldwide, and what appears to be a preponderance (though perhaps a diminishing one) of Muslims in the West, reject Islamic supremacism and its sharia-encroachment agenda. We know that, by a large percentage, Muslims are the most common victims of jihadist terror. We know that Muslim reformers are courageously working to undermine and reinterpret the scriptural roots of Islamic supremacism -- a crucial battle our default from makes far more difficult for them to win. We know that Muslims, particularly those assimilated into the West, have been working with our law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies for decades to gather intelligence, infiltrate jihadist cells, thwart jihadist attacks, and fight jihadist militias.

None of those Muslims -- who are not only our allies, but are in fact us -- believes that America is at war with Islam.

So why does Washington base crucial, life-and-death policy on nonsense?

Because it is in the thrall of the enemy. The “war on Islam” propaganda is manufactured by Islamist groups, particularly those tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

While we resist study of our enemies’ ideology, they go to school on us. They thus grasp three key things:

(1) Washington is so bloated and dysfunctional, it will leap on any excuse to refrain from strong action;

(2) the American tradition of religious liberty can be exploited to paralyze our government if national defense against a totalitarian political ideology can be framed as hostility and persecution against an entire religious faith; and

(3) because Washington has so much difficulty taking action, it welcomes claims (or, to be faddish, “narratives”) that minimize the scope and depth of the threat. Topping the “narrative” list is the fantasy that the Islamist ideological support system that nurtures jihadism (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood and its tentacles) is better seen as a “moderate,” “non-violent” partner with whom we can work, than as what it actually is: the enemy’s most effective agent. The stealth operative that exploits the atmosphere of intimidation created by the jihadists.

In other words, in proceeding from the premise that we must do nothing to convey the notion that we are “at war with Islam” -- or, in Obama-Clinton parlance, in proceeding from the premise that we need a good “narrative” rather than a truth-based strategy -- we have internalized the enemy’s worldview, a view that is actually rejected by our actual Islamic allies and the vast majority of Americans.

The delusion comes into sharp relief if one listens to Hillary Clinton’s campaign bombast. Robert Spencer incisively quoted it earlier this week:

[W]e know that a lot of the rhetoric we’ve heard from Donald Trump has been seized on by terrorists, in particular ISIS, because they are looking to make this into a war against Islam, rather than a war against jihadists, violent terrorists, people who number maybe in the maybe tens of thousands, not the tens of millions, they want to use that to recruit more fighters to their cause, by turning it into a religious conflict. That’s why I’ve been very clear. We’re going after the bad guys and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going to go after an entire religion and give ISIS exactly what it’s wanting in order for them to enhance their position.

Sheer idiocy.

Our enemy is not the mere “tens of thousands” of jihadists. (She’s probably low-balling the number of jihadists worldwide, but let’s indulge her.) It is not merely ISIS, nor merely ISIS and al-Qaeda -- an organization Mrs. Clinton conveniently omits mentioning, since it has replenished, thanks to Obama-Clinton governance and despite Obama-Clinton claims to have defeated it, to the point that it is now at least as much a threat as it was on the eve of 9/11.

ISIS and al-Qaeda are not the sources of the threat against us. They are the inevitable results of that threat.

The actual threat, the source, is Islamic supremacism and its sharia imposition agenda.

The support system, which the threat needs to thrive, does indeed include tens of millions of Islamists, some small percentage of whom will inexorably become violent jihadists, but the rest of whom will nurture the ideological aggression and push the radical sharia agenda -- in the media, on the campus, in the courts, and in the policy councils of government that they have so successfully influenced and infiltrated.

Obviously, to acknowledge that we are at war with this movement, at war with Islamic supremacism, is not remotely to be “at war with Islam.” After all, Islamic supremacism seeks conquest over all of Islam, too, and on a much more rapid schedule than its long-term pursuit of conquest over the West. Islamic supremacism is not a fringe movement; it is large and, at the moment, a juggernaut. But too much of Islam opposes Islamic supremacism to be confused with it.

Moreover, even if being at war with Islamic supremacists could be persuasively spun as being “at war with Islam” -- i.e., even if we were too incompetent to refute our enemies’ propaganda convincingly -- it would make no difference.

The war would still be being prosecuted against us. We have to fight it against the actual enemy, and we lose if we allow enemies to dupe us into thinking they are allies. We have to act on reality, even if Washington is too tongue-tied to find the right words for describing reality.

The enemy is in our heads and has shaped our perception of the conflict, to the enemy’s great advantage. That’s how you end up with inanities like “lone wolf.”

Something that has influenced my thinking greatly is "evolutionary psychology" in general and the writings of Konrad Lorenz in particular (after whom my son Conrad is named btw).In my own thinking in the case of humans I have added Predation. Normally predatory behavior is inter species and thus outside the definition of aggression, but in the case of humans, much criminal behavior is predatory in nature (e.g. the money stolen is a form of food) In one of his final books, "The Waning of Humanness" Lorenz spoke of particular dynamic that he called "collective militant enthusiasm" in which a group whips itself into a frenzy for collective action against "the other".Lenin-Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Islamic Fascism can all be seen as manifestations of this dynamic.

Hi Crafty

That's an analysis I can agree with. Ideas can be predatory, and seek to destroy other ideas that challenge them - supremacist ideologies are predatory ideas. There's something about the persistence of these particularly pernicious ideas that says a lot about our innate human nature with its potential for evil.

Imagine this hypothetical scenario. It is World War 2, and the American government has instructed its military and intelligence services that they are not to use the words "Nazi", "SS", Hitler", "Third Reich", "Final Solution", "Mein Kampf" and other 'ideological' terms. The US also decides not to declare the Nazis an outlawed organisation.

The army and intelligence services will dismiss their experts on Europe, Germany, the Nazis, German speakers. Instead, euphemistic neutral terms must be employed. Next, a group of "moderate" Nazis (who are to remain anonymous) will consult with the army and intelligence services to draft policy and future plans on combating the enemy who must not be named, using only language which will not be offensive to Nazis.

As the report below indicates, this is precisely what the US government did in regard to the threat of Islamist terror. Since then, under President Obama, we have seen a rapid escalation of terror attacks worldwide, with marked escalation in Europe and America, and the spectacular growth of ISIS.

"Counter-terrorism and counter-violence should be defined by us ... We should define how an effective counter-terrorism policy should be pursued in this country. ~ MPAC founder Salam al-Marayati, at an Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) conference in Dallas, 2005.

To quote various passages from the attached document:

In June 2013, as a result of its lawsuit, Judicial Watch obtained and released hundreds of pages of FBI records revealing that, in 2012, the agency purged its anti-terrorism training curricula of material determined by a group of “Subject Matter Experts” to be “offensive” to Muslims.

The FBI refused to disclose the identities of these “Subject Matter Experts.” The excised material included references linking the Muslim Brotherhood to terrorism, tying al Qaeda to the 1993 World Trade Center and Khobar Towers bombings, and suggesting that “young male immigrants of Middle Eastern appearance ... may fit the terrorist profile best.”

The Department of Defense (DoD) instituted a purge similar to the FBI’s. On April 24, 2012, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey ordered the entire U.S. military to “review” its educational and training classes, files, and rosters of instructors to ensure that no members of the armed services were studying material “disrespectful of the Islamic religion.”

Controlling language is essential for effective influence operations, as part of a broader active measures campaign. An example of the radical purging of certain terms and phrases from government lexicons can be found by comparing language used in the 9/11 Commission Report to that used in both the 2009 National Intelligence Estimate and the 2008 FBI Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon.

In an October 6, 2011 press release, CAIR Director Nihad Awad thanked “Director Mueller for his pledge to perform a ‘top to bottom’ review of FBI counterterrorism training.”

The Explanatory Memorandum documents how Islamists are waging Jihad on the West by a variety of means and on a number of fronts. There is nothing new about the Jihad phenomenon – it has been carried out to one degree or another since AD 632, although its current politicized manifestation traces its roots to the first half of the 20th century.

The Koran demands Jihad. We ignore that fact at our peril. Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, an expert in jihadist ideology and a Visiting Professor at the Defence Academy of the UK, has stated, “Islamism has replaced communism as the most significant ideological opponent of the Western liberal world order. Radical Islamist movements have declared war on the West as wellas on other Muslims."

Current jihadist operations are conducted under the umbrella, direction and coordination of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the MB, as well as al Qaeda (AQ) and its affiliates. The MB’s motto provides perspective on their ideology and operations: "Allah is our objective; the Koran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and dying in the way of Allah is the highest of our aspirations."

The arsenal of jihad includes the weapons of terrorism and acts of war, as well as influence campaigns, propaganda and active measures.